The use of advanced CMOS technologies, for example, the use of technologies less than or equal to 65 nanometers, leads to the use of lower and lower power supply voltages.
In the International Patent Application WO 2011/089179 (and U.S. equivalent patent publication 2013/0141824), an electronic device has been provided that is in particular designed for the protection against electrostatic discharges, and is capable of triggering at voltages lower than those offered by conventional ESD protection based, for example, on transistors whose gate is connected to ground, referred to as “GG NMOS transistors” (“Grounded Gate NMOS transistors”), which allowed the overvoltage across the terminals of the component to be protected to be limited to a lower value.
In this International Patent Application, the electronic protection device was based on the use of an MOS transistor including a parasitic bipolar transistor, configured for operating in a hybrid mode including an operation of the MOS type in a sub-threshold mode and an operation of the parasitic bipolar transistor.
The principle of a hybrid operation of an MOS transistor has been demonstrated in the article by Ph. Galy and V. Berland entitled “Ideal Gummel curves simulation of high current gain vertical NPN BIMOS transistor”, INT. J. ELECTRONICS, 1996, vol. 80 No. 6,717-726. This article is a theoretical study carried out on a transistor with a vertical structure having a gate length (channel length) of the order of a micron and validated by simulations, without any particular application of such a hybrid operation being mentioned.
A tetrapodal microelectronic component, combining the bipolar effect and the MOS effect in a hybrid mode of operation in such a manner as to improve the current gain, has also been described in the French Patent Application No. 2 784 503. Such a component is presented as withstanding ionizing radiation and it is stated in a general manner that it may be employed for consumer, spatial and/or military applications, in the digital and analog fields, without a particular application of the hybrid operation of the component being mentioned.